There was a moment late in this season of Homeland, when Carrie Mathison’s CIA colleagues were trying to track down the terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir. The analysts were looking at security camera footage of Nazir in a gas station, his SUV visible through the station’s front window. With a few clicks of the mouse and keyboard, grey lines started to streak across the screen as the monitor zoomed in on the car’s license plate. In a few seconds, the plate sharpened from a pixelated blur into a high-def, perfectly legible close up.

On a show that (at least until this season’s last few episodes) took pains to appear realistic, the images on that computer screen — the crazy zoom, the strangely elegant moving lines, the sudden sharpness of the image — were hilariously, irritatingly implausible. As anybody who’s dealt with grainy footage, or, for that matter, used a computer, knows, this sequence of extreme sharpening is impossible: At a certain point, a blurry image is just a blurry image. Even if you could zoom in to such a dramatic degree, the process would involve staring at a clunky interface with lots of buttons and tools, and it would doubtless be long and entail a lot of spinning icons and the word “rendering.”